IS1: Eir innovation-session plenary lectures

Louise Feilberg, Head of European Affairs, Coloplast A/S, Board member Eucomed and Medicoindustrien (Danish MedTech Association)

The MedTech Industry is playing an increasingly important role in solving tomorrow’s healthcare challenges. Today, more than 500,000 medical technologies are available to healthcare professionals, the MedTech industry employs 500.000 people in Europe, and it grows more than 5% per year.

The industry continues to grow and thus continues to contribute to solving the healthcare challenges. However, there are challenges ahead. Regulatory burdens are increasing. Ageing societies with more people needing care means healthcare budgets are under pressure – how does that impact the industry? how can the MedTech industry continue to develop products to fit the needs of patient and professionals whilst keeping up innovating new products at a fast pace?

Academic research institutions produce a large amount of interesting research results. Results that could lead to innovative products, services or processes. However, very often the industry cannot just take such a result and develop an innovation out of it. The gap between academic achievement and the point a company can take over with a reasonable risk is usually large. This gap can be reduced or even eliminated by setting up a research collaboration between academia and industry which fosters knowledge transfer. Knowledge transfer from academia to industry and from industry to academia. In this talk, I will present examples of such collaborations together with best practices and lessons learned.

Peter M. Eriksen, CEO, BioPorto A/S. Chairman MTIC, Board Member in Nervex A/S and advisory Board Member at Lund University

There are a number of obstacles for most ideas and startups why only a few of them turn into success stories. One of the major obstacles is how to get the necessary funding for the development of the first proto type. Having achieved this, however, the road to commercial success for a product is still long and full of pitfalls.

The presentation draws upon experience from the last 20 years in funding, bringing products to markets and creating commercial success and will touch upon success stories as well as failures. The presentation will also include other aspects such as how the big industry is looking at potential acquisitions and development to illustrate different entry and exit points.

Reaching the point of being able to walk is an important first goal for a majority of stroke patients, and is a focus area for the Integrative Neuroscience Group headed by Ole. K. Andersen at Center for Sensory-Motor Interaction. Over the past 10 years, they have been developing a novel method termed Reflex-based electrical therapy that utilizes the nociceptive withdrawal reflex to assist the patients in regaining the ability to walk after a stroke. In this talk, I will give an introduction to this method and how it was brought out of academia and into a spinout company.

Ageing societies demand efficient rehabilitation technologies that would increase the productivity of rehabilitation of movement disorders while at the same time decreasing the number of clinical staff. This would appear as a perfect opportunity for related industry, however, one needs to note that the market for rehabilitation devices is fragmented, segmented and often fall under regulatory constraints of each individual country. Therefore, ideas for new devices often also require creation of a new market for a particular device. This means that time-to-market is rather long representing a substantial financial burden, which also makes a process of transferring new ideas into products through either establishing a spin-off company or setting-up a licensing agreement rather unique in each particular case. In this talk our experience on developing rehabilitation devices for balancing during standing and walking as well as for training sit-to-stand maneuvers and movement of upper extremities and transferring them to markets will be presented.

Advanced computer input devices are important for severely disabled people suffering from e.g. tetraplegia. An example of such a computer interface is the inductive tongue computer interface which has been developed from research at Center for Sensory-Motor Interaction Aalborg University. The interface consist of an intraoral keyboard and a mouse pad, which is operated by the tongue, and is used to control computers, wheelchairs, tablets, etc. In this talk we will give an introduction to the method and describe the challenges and experiences from the process of translating an idea into a product - starting from the research performed at the university, the establishment of the related spin off company TKS A/S, the CE-marking process, and the marketing aspects of the end product: iTongue which was CE-certified in 2013.